Last post, I mentioned returning to cognition. Here it is.
Spiegel’s fantastic breakdown of the facets of how an estranging effect is worked upon an audience by the formal and stylistic devices of a text throws out cognition entirely.
My goal is to unpack how, when, why, cognition is a useful tool in terms of comprehending the effect of estrangement.
Cognition is heavily mediated by emotion. Emotion is heavily mediated by what one has been socialized into perceiving as a natural or unnatural response, according to the society’s dictates on what counts as “good” or “bad” behavior. This, of course, is then highly mediated by individual differences as well as ‘innate’ primate responses. The body is aroused, and then the arousal is processed and interpreted. Matsuda and Kitayama point out that arousal in Western cultures tends to be interpreted subjectively, whereas in other cultures, the interpretation tends to be inter-subjective. The West also has a causality bias. That is, in the West, when we are aroused, we take complete responsibility for the body-feeling and that shows up in how we interpret the emotion and assign it a cause. When we feel stressed, we tend to interpret it in terms of individual responsibility (or in shifting away from individual responsibility, hence the prevalence of the blame-game in our culture.) Intense emotions tend to need to be assigned a cause as part of the process of reconciling them, and we tend to assign a cause in terms of our individual reality (either by taking responsibility or by ascribing responsibility to events in our memory). I.E. I’m so messed up because my parents did x while we were kids, and now I can’t help feeling this way. (the blame game).
Of course, recent shifts in psychology in particular in terms of mindfulness, are attempting to shift people away from this mode of thinking, teaching distancing cognitive behaviors to help people realize that emotions are but one facet of reality and that they don’t have to over-identify with them.
Keeping in mind this is highly generalized.
What does this have to do with SF? Well, I think it is important to look at emotional appeals as part of the stylistic/formal devices of a piece of text in more detail than the lovely umbrella term “estrangement” allows for. Granted, estrangement does a fantastic job creating a useful flexible generalized term to encompass the variation of audience response.
One way to do this is by setting up a taxonomy of “emotional intelligence” for central characters as part of investigating how literature develops empathy, or as part of acknowledging that most readers read in order to identify with the main character in some way shape or form.
Another way to do this is to examine how characters are set up as constrained by the emotional weight of certain key beliefs, and how those affect decision making (logic is constrained by emotional beliefs).
Another way to do this is to historically situate a text, looking at how it uses formal elements in its response to the structure of feeling of its time. Is it reflecting it, refracting it, denying it, etc etc etc.
What goes on in these maps of social hell? 